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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 941 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

order of 28 responses. We know that a number of these submissions were also sent to other committees. That was done because those particular stakeholders faced that difficulty of cross-portfolio topics.

Some organisations found some difficulty in understanding the process and what their role was and what their opportunities for consultation were as a result of the communications that were made public and the process. I think that if the process is to be continued the Government has to be a bit clearer in relation to the public consultation process.

Moving on to the budget itself, I have to say that the Finance and Public Administration Committee is not a committee that relates to the spending processes within budget. The spending portfolios are quite outside our purview, so to some extent we were limited by the resolution and by our role in otherwise having a good time spending government money.

We were concerned that one of the inhibitions on this process is that the draft budget is prepared so early in the reporting cycle for the current financial year. I think the best numbers or the latest numbers we saw when we were doing this process were prepared in November of last year and, quite obviously, they were not up to date in terms of the full accrual accounting process. We rather suspect that those public servants who worked on this budget, such as the work was, would have had some difficulty in extrapolating from the figures that were available. Certainly, we found, as a committee, that there was not a great deal of value to be had in the reports that we had to date. So one of the difficulties with this process that I think the Government has to accept is that we are working without the benefit of much information at all on the current financial year and any new directions that might have been taken by the prevailing budget.

We note that the base point of the budget is based on fairly optimistic assessments. We note that the national economy is particularly buoyant at the time and that the ACT is bubbling along in concert and in parallel with that.

Mr Humphries: We are ahead of it. We are rather better than the national economy.

MR QUINLAN: Yes, we do tend sometimes to oscillate around the national trend, but we certainly follow it. We still remain somewhat cautious as a committee that consumption has been high; that the economy is buoyant; that the ACT economy has probably benefited from expenditures on Y2K in the immediate past because of its central nature and the fact that the city operates largely on the information industry of one sort or another, whether it be government or non-government. We are also concerned that there is the possibility of corrections within the economy, as they are euphemistically called, because of the high consumption rate and high retail sales post GST.

The committee does have genuine concern as to what may happen post GST, given that we know that there is tremendous activity in some sectors of the economy as a function of the impending GST, such as in the building industry. Some people are already getting caught now trying to get work done before the GST hits them. They are finding

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